Marx on the American “General Redistribution”

Published:Vperyod, No. 15, April 20 (7), 1905.

      Published according to the text inVperyod.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Foreign Languages Publishing House,1962,

      Moscow,Volume 8,

      pages323-329.Translated:Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor LaskerTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2003).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

InVperyod,

			       No. 12,[1]there was a reference to Marx’s polemic against
Kriege on the agrarian question. The year was not 1848, as erroneously stated in
the article by Comrade —, but 1846. Hermann Kriege, a co-worker of Marx
and at the time a very young man, had gone to America in 1845 and there started
a journal, theVolkstribun, for the propaganda of communism. But he
conducted this propaganda in such a manner that Marx was obliged to protest
very strongly in the name of the German Communists against Hermann Kriege’s
discrediting of the Communist Party. The criticism of Kriege’s trend, published
in 1846 inWestphälische Dampfboot[3]and
reprinted in Volume II of Mehring’s edition of Marx’s works, is of tremendous
interest to present-day Russian Social-Democrats.

Thepoint is that the agrarian question at that time had been brought to the
fore by the course of the American social movement, as is the case now in
Russia; it was not a question of a developed capitalist society, but, on the
contrary, of the creation of the primary and fundamental conditions for a real
development of capitalism. This circumstance is of particular importance for
drawing a parallel between Marx’s attitude towards the American ideas of
“general redistribution” and the attitude of Russian
Social-Democrats to wards the present-day peasant movement.

Kriegegave no data in his journal for a concrete study of the distinctive
features of the American social system and for defining the true character of
the movement of thecontemporary agrarian reformers who campaigned for the abolition of rent. What
      Kriege did do, though (quite in the style of our
      “Socialists-Revolutionaries”), was to clothe the question of the
      agrarian revolution in bombastic and high-sounding phrases: “Every
      poor man,” wrote Kriege, “will become a useful member of human
      society as soon as he is given an opportunity to engage in productive
      work. He will be assured such an opportunity for all time if society gives
      him a piece of land on which he can keep himself and his family.... If
      this immense area (the 1,400,000,000 acres of North American public domain) is withdrawn from commerce and is secured in restricted amounts for

			       labour,[2]an end will be put to poverty in America at one stroke....”

Tothis Marx replies: “One would have expected him to understand that
legislators have no power to decree that the evolution of the patriarchal
system, which Kriege desires, into an industrial system be checked, or that the
industrial and commercial states of the East coast be thrown back to patriarchal
barbarism.”

Thus,we have before us a real plan for an American general redistribution: the
withdrawal of a vast land expanse from commerce, the securing of title to the
land, limitation of the extent of landownership or land tenure. And from the
very outset Marx subjects this utopianism to sober criticism, he points out
that the patriarchal system evolves inevitably into the industrial system,
i.e., to use present-day idiom, he points out the inevitability of the
development of capitalism. But it would be a great mistake to think
that the utopian
dreams of the participants in the movement caused Marx to adopt a negative
attitude to the movement in general. Nothing of the kind. Already then, at the
very beginning of his literary activity, Marx was able to extract the real and
progressive content of a movement from its tawdry ideological trappings. In the
second part of his criticism, entitled “The Economics [i.e., the
political economy]of theVolkstribunand Its Attitude to Young America”, Marx
wrote:

“Wefully recognise the historical justification of the movement of the
American National Reformers. We know that this movement strives for a result
which, true, would give a temporary impetus to the industrialisation of modern
bourgeois society, but which, as a product of the proletarian movement, and as
an attack on landed property in general, especially under prevailing American
conditions, must inevitably lead, by its own consequences, to
communism. Kriege, who with the German Communists in New York joined
the Anti-RentBewegung[movement], clothes this simple fact in bombastic phrases,
without entering into the content of the movement, thereby proving that he is
quite at sea as regards the connection between young America and American
social conditions. We will cite another example of his outpouring of enthusiasm
for humanity over the agrarians’ plan for parcelling the land on an American
scale.

“Inissue No. 10 of theVolkstribun, in an article entitled ’What
We Want’, we read: ’The American National Reformers call the land the common
heritage of all men ... and demand that the national legislature pass measures
to preserve the 1,400,000,000 acres of land not yet fallen into the hands of the
grabbing speculators, as the inalienable common property of the whole of
mankind.’ In order to preserve for all mankind this ’inalienable common property’, he accepts the plan of the National Reformers: ’to provide every peasant,
whatever country he may come from, with 160 acres of American land for his
subsistence’; or, as it is expressed in issue No. 14, in ’An Answer to Conze’:
’Of these unappropriated public lands no one is to have a holding in excess of
160 acres, and this only provided he tills it himself.’ Thus, in order to
preserve the land as ’inalienable common property’, and for ’the whole of
mankind’ besides, it is necessary immediately to begin parcelling it
out. Kriege, moreover, imagines that he can rule out the necessary consequences
of this allotment—concentration, industrial progress, and the like, by
legislation. He regards 160 acres of land as an invariable quantity, as though
the value of such an area did not vary according to its quality. The ’peasants’
will have to exchange the produce of the land, ifnot the land itself, among themselves and with others, and, having gone thus
      far, they will soon find that one ’peasant’, even without capital, thanks
      to his labour and the greater original fertility of his 160 acres, has
      reduced another to the position of his farm-hand. Besides, what matters it
      whether it is ’the land’ or the produce of the land that ’falls into the
      hands of grabbing speculators’? Let us seriously examine Kriege’s gift to
      mankind. One thousand four hundred million acres are to be

I)reservedas
      the ’inalienable common property of the whole of mankind’, with every
      ’peasant’ getting 160 acres. We can therefore compute the magnitude of
      Kriege’s ’mankind’: exactly 8,750,000 ’peasants’, who, counting five to a
      family, represent 43,750,000 people. We can also compute the duration of
      the ’for all time’ during which ’the proletariat, as the representative of
      the whole of mankind’, at least in the U.S.A., can lay claim to all the
      land. If the population of the U.S.A. continues to increase at its present
      rate, i.e., if it doubles in 25 years, then this ’for all time’ will last
      something under 40 years; by then these 1,400,000,000 acres will have been
      occupied, and future generations will have nothing to ’lay claim to’. But
      as the free grant of land would greatly in crease immigration, Kriege’s
      ’for all time’ might come to an end even sooner, particularly if it is
      borne in mind that land for 44,000,000 people would not be an adequate
      outlet even for the pauperism existing in Europe today; for in Europe one
      out of every 10 persons is a pauper, and the British Isles alone account
      for 7,000,000 paupers. A similar example of naiveté in political economy
      is to be found in issue No. 13, in the article ’To the Women’, in which
      Kriege says that if the city of New York gave up its 52,000 acres of land
      on Long Island, this would suffice to rid New York of all pauperism,
      misery, and crime ’at one stroke’ and for ever.

“HadKriege regarded the movement for freeing the land as an early form of
the proletarian movement, necessary under certain conditions, as a movement
which, by reason of the position in social life of the class from which it
emanates, must necessarily develop into a communist movement; had he shown why
the communist aspirations in America had to manifest themselves initially in
this agrarian form,which seems to contradict all communism, there would have been nothing to object
to. But he declares what is merely a subordinate form of a movement of
definite, real people to be a cause of mankind in general. He represents this
cause ... as the ultimate and highest aim of every movement in general, thus
turning the definite aims of the movement into sheer bombastic nonsense. In the
same article (issue No. 10) he continues to chant his paean: ’And so the old
dreams of the Europeans would at last come true. A place would be prepared for
them on this side of the ocean which they would only have to take and to
fructify with the labour of their hands, so as to be able proudly to declare to
all the tyrants of the world, ’This ismycabin, which you have not
built; this ismyhearth whose glow fills your hearts with envy.’

“Hemight have added, This ismydunghill, which I, my wife, my
children, my manservant, and my cattle have produced. And who are the Europeans
whose ’dreams’ would thus come true? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt
shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, or ruined cottars, who yearn for the good
fortune of once again becoming petty bourgeois and peasants in America. And what
is the ’dream’ that is to be fulfilled by means of these 1,400,000,000 acres? No
other than that all men be converted into private owners, a dream which is as
unrealisable and as communistic as the dream to convert all men into emperors,
kings, and popes.”

Marx’scriticism is full of caustic sarcasm. He scourges Kriege for those very
aspects of his views which we now observe among our
“Socialists-Revolutionaries”, namely, phrase-mongering,
petty-bourgeois utopias represented as the highest revolutionary utopianism,
incomprehension of the real foundations of the modern economic system and its
development. With remarkable penetration, Marx, who was then only thefutureeconomist, points to the role of exchange and commodity
production.The peasants, he says, will exchange the produce of the land, if not
the land itself, and that says everything! The question is dealt with in a way
that is largely applicable to the Russian peasant movement and its
petty-bourgeois “socialist” ideologists.

Marx,however, does not simply “repudiate” this petty bourgeois
movement, he does not dogmatically ignore it, hedoes not fear to soil his hands by contact with the movement of the
      revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats—a fear that is
      characteristic of many doctrinaires. While mercilessly
      ridiculing the absurd ideological trappings of the movement,
      Marx strives in a sober, materialist manner to

deter mineitsrealhistorical content, the
    consequences that must inevitably follow from it because of objective
    conditions, regardless of the will and the consciousness, the dreams and the
    theories, of the various individuals. Marx, therefore, does not condemn, but
    fully approves communist support of the movement. Adopting the dialectical
    standpoint, i.e., examining the movement from every aspect, taking into
    account both the past and the future, Marx notes the revolutionary aspect
    of the attack on private property in land. He recognises the petty-bourgeois
    movement as a peculiar initial form of the proletarian, communist
    movement. You will not achieve what you dream of by means of this movement,
    says Marx to Kriege: instead of fraternity, you will get petty-bourgeois
    exclusiveness; instead of inalienable peasant allotments, you will have the
    drawing of the land into commerce; instead of a blow at the grabbing
    speculators, you will witness the expansion of the basis for capitalist
    development. But the capitalist evil you are vainly hoping to avoid is a
    historical benefit, for it will accelerate social development tremendously
    and bring ever so much nearer new and higher forms of the communist
    movement. A blow struck at landed property will facilitate the inevitable
    further blows at property in general. The revolutionary action of the lower
    class for a change that will temporarily provide a restricted prosperity,
    and by no means for all, will facilitate the inevitable further
    revolutionary action of the very lowest class for a change that will really
    ensure complete human happiness for all toilers.

Marx’spresentation of the case against Kriege should serve as a model for us
Russian Social-Democrats. That the peasant movement in Russia today is of a
really petty-bourgeois nature there can be no doubt. We must explain this fact
by every means in our power, and we must ruthlessly and irreconcilably combat
all the illusions of all the “Socialists Revolutionaries” or
primitive socialists on this score. The organisation of an independent party of
the proletariat which,through all democratic upheavals, will strive for the complete socialist
revolution, must be our constant aim, not to be lost sight of for a moment. But
to turn away from the peasant movement for this reason would be sheer
philistinism and pedantry. No, there is no doubt as to the revolutionary and
democratic nature of this movement, and we must with all our might support it,
develop it, make it a politically conscious and definitely class movement,
advance it, and go hand in hand with it to the end—for we go much further
than the end of any peasant movement; we go to the very end of the division of
society into classes. There is hardly another country in the world where the
peasantry is experiencing such suffering, such oppression and degradation as in
Russia. The worse this oppression has been, the more powerful will now be the
peasantry’s awakening, the more irresistible its revolutionary onset. The
class-conscious revolutionary proletariat should support this onset with all its
might, so that it may leave stand no stone of this old, accursed, feudal,
autocratic, and slavish Russia; so that it may create a new generation of free
and courageous people, a new republican country in which our proletarian
struggle for socialism will be able freely to expand.

[1]See p. 250 of this volume.—Ed.

[2]Recall whatRevolutsionnaya Rossiya, beginning with issue
No.8, wrote on the passing of the land from capital to labour, on the
importance of state lands in Russia, on equalised land tenure, on the
bourgeois idea of drawing land into commercial transactions, etc. Precisely
like Kriege!—Lenin

[3]Das Westphälische Dampiboot (Westphalian
Steanzer)—aGerman periodical of a democratic trend published in
Westphalia between 1845 and 1848. The journal published occasional articles by
Karl
 Marx and Frederick Engels.